International Research Fellowship Program: Modeling Alpine Population Histories with Approximate Bayesian Computation

国际研究奖学金计划使美国科学家和工程师能够在国外进行9至24个月的研究。 该计划的奖项提供了联合研究的机会，以及使用国外独特或互补的设施，专业知识和实验条件。 该奖项将支持肖恩博士24个月的研究奖学金。Schoville与法国格勒诺布尔理工学院的Olivier Francois博士合作。 在过去的270万年里，冰川循环导致高山生态系统的快速、区域性重组。这些生态系统提供了一个自然复制的模型系统，以研究最近的空间和时间的环境变化如何影响物种形成和群落组装的过程。目前，利用遗传数据来推断种群的时空历史在很大程度上局限于一套有限的分析模型。近似贝叶斯计算（ABC）是一种方法学方法，可用于扩展所考虑的人口模型集，并提供定量标准，以在统计上区分这些替代模型。该研究项目利用ABC方法来研究人口变化的模式和高山种群的分化时间，在三个地理上独立的高山生态系统中的许多共存物种。这种比较研究是否在高山物种的空间，时间和人口的变化遵循可预测的模式在北方半球。 本研究的培训目标包括人口遗传数据的统计分析，生物信息学和计算生物学。在应用方面，这项研究提供了一个重要的进步，在该领域的地理学实施客观的，统计标准时，区分替代进化假说，并允许大规模的比较，建立在定量方法。气候变化和景观改造是高山物种进化史上共有的主要环境因子。展示这些环境因素在塑造共同分布的物种的进化的重要性将有影响的影响，持续的气候变化和战略需要管理受威胁的高山物种的短期生态生存能力和长期的进化潜力。这项研究开发了关于北方半球高山生物多样性的国际合作项目，重点是进化历史，生态系统组织和保护。

The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct nine to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a twenty-four-month research fellowship by Dr. Sean D. Schoville to work with Dr. Olivier Francois at Grenoble Institute of Technology in France. Glacial cycles have caused rapid, regional reorganization of alpine ecosystems at repeated intervals in the last 2.7 million years. These ecosystems provide a naturally replicated model system to study how recent spatial and temporal environmental change can influence processes of species formation and community assembly. At present, the utilization of genetic data to make inferences about the spatial and temporal history of populations is largely restricted to a limited set of analytical models. Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) is a methodological approach that can be used to expand the set of population models considered and provide quantitative criteria to statistically discriminate between these alternative models. This research project utilizes ABC methodology to examine patterns of demographic change and the timing of divergence in alpine populations, across many co-occurring species in three geographically independent alpine ecosystems. This comparison examines whether spatial, temporal and demographic change in alpine species follows predicable patterns across the Northern Hemisphere. Training objectives of this research include statistical analysis of population genetic data, bioinformatics, and computational biology. On the applied side, this research provides an important advance in the field of biogeography by implementing objective, statistical criteria when discriminating between alternative evolutionary hypotheses and allowing broad scale comparisons to be built on quantitative methods. Climate change and landscape modification are the primary environmental agents that are shared in the evolutionary history of alpine species. Demonstrating the importance of these environmental factors in shaping the evolution of co-distributed species will have implications for the effects of ongoing climate changes and the strategies needed to manage threatened alpine species both for short-term ecological viability and long-term evolutionary potential. This research develops international collaborative projects on alpine biodiversity across the Northern Hemisphere, focusing on evolutionary history, ecosystem organization and conservation.